From: FCW
By Adam Mazmanian
Could a new procurement reform bill revolutionize the way the federal government does information technology procurement, or is it just another update to the policies established by the Clinger-Cohen Act in 1996?
The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act passed out of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee in March with unanimous backing. Sponsored by committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and longtime committee member Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the bill grants budget authority to agency chief information officers, turns the CIO position into a presidential appointment, and creates a new inter-agency office within the Office of Management and Budget to develop standards and best practices for government-wide procurement.
In addition, FITARA provides detailed advice for achieving cost savings in a variety of areas, notably data center consolidation, cloud computing, and the use of government-wide licenses for software. It would establish a centralized price list for IT infrastructure and common applications and create a system of reviewing new IT contracts for possible duplication.
“If you authorize CIOs, then by definition, the term should mean something,” Issa said when previewing the legislation back in December. “When you have hundreds of them for 24 major agencies, you really don’t have chiefs. That’s the most important thing that this bill is intended to do – to redefine the term ‘chief’ to mean ‘the chief.'”
Giving agency CIOs budgetary authority would be “a sea change,” said Van Hitch, who spent more than nine years as the CIO of the Justice Department, and is currently senior advisor to Deloitte Consulting. “Most CIOs are in a position where not only do they not control all the IT dollars,” Hitch told FCW, “but in some cases they don’t have visibility into how those dollars are spent on a real-time basis, and therefore they can’t control them that well.”
Shifting the budgetary authority to an agency CIO would be a huge cultural shift, Hitch said. “Each of the cabinet agencies has big bureaus and they all have separate appropriations. If the CIO does not have a direct line to the IT organizations of those bureaus and does not control their budget, CIO is left to persuasion and camaraderie to try to get cooperation. That works sometimes, but ultimately, it pays to have the authority,” he said.
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